By Quest Riggs
Photo credit: EDUARDO MUNOZ ALVAREZ/AFP/Getty Images)
Since the revelation about the government’s separation of immigrant children from their families in mid- June, the struggle for the rights of undocumented workers and the struggle against ICE has exploded and reached new heights. The scale and spirit of this wave of resistance has highlighted the amount of solidarity with undocumented communities that already exists in the U.S. and the possibilities for a broader and stronger movement for justice.
Demonstrations swept the country on June 30, meeting the call for a national day of action. In every major city and in many small cities, the call to abolish ICE was heard around the country. In all there were over 700 actions on that one hot summer day, including a march in New Orleans from Congo Sqr. to Jackson Sqr. with 3,000 participants.
600 protesters were arrested in Washington D.C. as they occupied the Senate Office building. 100,000 marched in New York City along with tens of thousands more throughout the northeast. In Philadelphia an encampment in front of the ICE offce there from July 2 until July 5, when they were aggressively raided by the police. They then set up a new encampment with the same demands in front of City Hall.
The turnout was also good in other Southern cities, with thousands protesting in Raleigh and Atlanta. In Atlanta an encampment was held for a week at an ICE o ce until it was raided on July 9, with 39 arrested in the raid. Over 60,000 marched in Chicago calling for the abolition of ICE.
On the West Coast, large protest encampments were set up in both Portland and San Francisco, and 10,000 protesters rallied at the Seattle-Tacoma Federal Prison where hundreds of migrants are detained. The San Francisco encampment, like the Atlanta one, was held for a week before 39 were arrested when it was swept.
It is worth noting that federal police with the Department of Homeland Security, not just local police, were used against the protesters in many of the above cases. The repression of the movement against ICE is part of the total lack of democracy in capitalist society, just like the repression of the Black Lives Matter movement and the Standing Rock solidarity movement during the Obama presidency. The police at the local, state and federal levels are all controlled by the industries who pro t o of oppression. In the case of the Abolish ICE movement, the people pulling the strings are the profiteers of the prison-industrial complex, one of the most brutal white supremacist groupings in the U.S. ruling class.
But despite their commitment to mass-incarceration and genocide, our movement is getting stronger and solidarity is growing. It is important that we resist the attempts to misdirect this movement into legalistic and electoral directions. The Democratic party and its lackeys will never lead movements towards liberation or real change. If we blindly follow them just because they can pay lip service to justice, then the fascists in ICE and in the white house will only get stronger. Following the liberals means handing over all of our weapons of struggle to our oppressors.
In these barbarous times of capitalist hellfire all around us, the need to educate, agitate, and organize working class and oppressed people for a revolutionary struggle has never been greater.